The Initial Blessing of the New Covenant

The Pardon of Sin

Viii — 12. For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And their sins will I remember no more.

13. In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away.

OF the blessings of the new covenant, the one which is here mentioned last is in reality the first. For I will be merciful — this is what precedes, and is the ground of the renewal of the heart and the fellowship with God. Pardon is the door; holiness of heart and life the pathway; the presence of Godlhe blessedness of the Christian life. The first leads to the second, the first and second to the third. To live in God’s presence and fellowship two things must be clear: the thought of sin must be put away out of God’s heart, and the love of sin out of our heart. These two blessings are together secured in the new covenant. First, the forgiveness of sins so complete, that lie remembers them no more for ever; they never more enter into God’s heart. And, second, the renewal of our heart and will so complete, that the law of God is written there by the Holy Spirit, so that the will of God is our will.

The three blessings — the pardon of sin, purity of heart, and the presence of God — are so joined, that as our views and our acceptance of one is feeble, our hold on the others will suffer.

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In Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant they are offered and secured to us in their fulness, in the power of an endless life. But our experience of this depends upon our knowledge, our faith, our surrender. And it is because our understanding and acceptance and experience of the two first blessings is so defective that our fellowship with God, our entrance into the holy presence, and our abiding there, is still so much in Old Testament failure — But they continued not. Let us try and realise this.

Take the first of the three covenant blessings: I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins will I remember no more. In more than one respect the Christian’s thought of what this pardon is may be defective. With some it is nothing more than the remission of punishment. They think only of acquittal; they know not that it implies acceptance, complete restoration to the favour, to the heart and the home of the Father. They are content with pardon, as the escape from a great danger; of the surrender to, and the life abiding in the love that pardoned, they know little. With others the thought of pardon is mostly connected with individual or with daily sin. They have no conception of the entire and eternal putting away of sin out of God’s sight and thought, which is assured to us in the words: Their sins will I remember no more. And with still others, whose views may be more accurate, the pardon of God exercises so little power, because it has been accepted more with the mind than the heart. They consent to and claim what God’s word says of it; but have never, mostly owing to the want of any deep sense of sin, or any powerful workings of the Holy Spirit, realised the overwhelming glory of God’s mercy as they came to Himself to receive from His own mouth the pardon of their sins. In all these cases the

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farther blessings are scarce understood or sought, or if claimed, their full meaning and power are never known.

It is even so with the second covenant blessing. There are not a few who know indeed what the greatness of God’s pardoning love is, who yet never reach out to claim, as equally sure, the greatness of His sanctifying grace. The necessity of daily sinning, the impossibility of living for one day without actual transgression is such a deeply-rooted conviction, and there is such confidence that God’s word teaches it, that the mind cannot for a moment enter into what the word has said of the radical difference between the old covenant and the new in this respect. The confounding the freedom from any sinful tendency, and freedom in the power of Christ’s indwelling from actual sinning, even with the sinful tendency still remaining, is so universal, that every attempt to press home the promise of the law written in the heart, in its contrast to the Old Testament life, is regarded as dangerous. The wonderful promise is levelled down to the ordinary experience of the ordinary Christian life. No wonder then that the crowning promise, They shall not every man teach his brother, Know the Lord, with its direct teaching of the Holy Spirit, and its direct fellowship with God through the Spirit, is neither valued nor claimed, and the entrance through the rent veil into the Holiest of All and the presence of God postponed to another world.

Let us pray the Father to give us enlightened eyes of the hearty to know what is the hope of His calling to a life in His love and will, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, — the direct and full access to His presence and fellowship, and what the exceeding greatness of His power in us who believe according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him on His own right hand. Let us believe that that exaltation of Christ out of the dead to His throne, and the assurance that that same mighty power works in us, means, even for this earth, a life of heavenly power and joy, of holiness and happiness which it hath not entered into the heart to conceive. Jesus, the Priest-King on the throne, is the surety of the covenant. Let us, like Him, yield ourselves to that death to sin and to self, out of which God raised Him. Let us sink into the death of emptiness and nothingness and helplessness; let us, as dead, wait for the mighty operation of God. He who gave Jesus as Mediator of the new covenant, and surety for its promises, will reveal Him, and fulfil them in us, will bring us in Him within the veil, and give us our life there in the secret of His blessed presence.

1. Pardon of sin is the door, the entrance to the Father’s home. The law in the heart is the life and walk there, the fitness to draw nigh to Qod. Direct fellowship with Bod; this is the blessedness to be found in God’s presence.

2. All the three blessings in Him the surety of the covenant. In Him our justification and the assurance that our sins no more come up before Him. In Him our sanctif cation, with the Holy Spirit breathing His will into our very heart. In Him our complete redemption, the fitness to dwell in God’s presence for evermore.

SEVENTH SECTION.-x. 1-28.

The Power of Christ’s Blood in the opening of the New Sanctuary and the New Covenant.